IMPUESTO DE IMP
61.16 Guantes, mitones y manoplas, de punto
Central to the Achieving the Dream approach to improving success for all students is the idea that colleges need to build a “culture of inquiry, evidence, and accountability.” Accord- ing to the Achieving the Dream “framing paper,” which the initiative’s partners developed to guide the initiative:1
Institutions should make decisions and allocate resources based on evidence of what is working and what is not. A data-driven decision-making process is most effective when administrators, faculty and staff across the institution examine evidence and engage in frank discussions about outcomes for dif- ferent student populations. The college then sets measurable goals for im- provement and uses data to assess its progress.
Achieving the Dream encourages colleges to engage faculty, student services staff, and administrators on a wide scale in using data to understand where their students are experiencing problems, to design strategies for remedying those problems, to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies, and to make further changes based on the evaluation findings. Participating colleges received one-year planning grants to enable them to begin this process. Colleges are expected to continue data analysis during the four-year implementation phase and to institutionalize the process as the basis for continuing program review, strategic planning, and resource allocation.
Community colleges, as with most educational institutions, generally use data and re- search more to comply with regulations and funding requirements than to improve student out- comes.2
Colleges spend a great deal of time meeting the reporting requirements of federal, state, and local government agencies as well as of private funders. For example, colleges are required annually to submit extensive information on their students, faculty, finances, and other aspects of their operation to the U.S. Department of Education as part of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS. Yet, because the data it provides are generally institutional- level aggregates, IPEDS is generally not very useful to colleges in helping them decide how to improve the quality and impact of their programs and services.
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MDC, Inc. (2006a), p. 3.
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For most colleges in the initiative, therefore, the scope of the data analysis process re- quired by Achieving the Dream is a new challenge. It usually involves an expanded role for in- stitutional research (IR) staff and increased demands on colleges’ information systems, which are typically designed to support enrollment, scheduling, and other operational activities, rather than research. While some community colleges have well-staffed research offices and robust, user-friendly information systems, most do not.3
As Chapter 1 explains, each college participat- ing in Achieving the Dream has been assigned a data facilitator who, along with a coach, is re- sponsible for helping the college build and institutionalize a culture of evidence.
This chapter examines the efforts of the 27 Round 1 Achieving the Dream colleges to build a culture of evidence during the planning year and the first year of the four-year imple- mentation phase. The evaluation team’s visits to these colleges in spring 2006 yielded several notable findings. Achieving the Dream has clearly raised awareness of the importance of using data on students in decision-making. Besides the focus on helping underserved students suc- ceed, the “culture of evidence” concept seems to be the hallmark of Achieving the Dream, even among those not directly involved in the initiative. At several colleges, the evaluators found that when confronted with hard data about the poor outcomes of their students, faculty and staff were motivated to work to address the problems.
Transforming organizational cultures and practices to support data-based decision- making is clearly not easy, however. While most of the colleges attempted to follow at least the general outlines of the data analysis process advocated by Achieving the Dream, fewer than half involved a substantial segment of the faculty in analyzing data during the planning phase. At the other colleges, data analysis and decisions about strategies were confined to smaller groups, which did generally include faculty members, however. A little more than a third of the colleges used analysis of their own data to select strategies for the implementation phase. However, only a handful formulated their strategies based on a systematic diagnosis of the problems and an examination of previous attempts by the college to address them.
The most common obstacle to building a culture of evidence is the difficulty many col- leges have retrieving and analyzing data. For some colleges, the source of the problem seems to have been primarily with their information technology systems or staffing. In other cases, col- leges reported having too few IR staff, particularly for the heightened level of research required to support broad-based use of data. It is also clear that many colleges could use guidance on de- signing and conducting evaluations.
Faculty and staff at many of the colleges expressed concern that data would be used against them; others were skeptical that increased use of data and research would lead to im-
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proved student outcomes. Even colleges that have been successful in getting buy-in for in- creased data-based decision-making still confront the challenge that most faculty and staff are not accustomed to using data in the way that Achieving the Dream advocates. The lack of fa- miliarity with using data to analyze and devise improvements on student outcomes often ex- tends to the most basic level, such as what questions to ask.
These findings suggest that expanding data-based decision-making in colleges requires not only investing adequate resources in IR staff and addressing technical barriers to data access but also increasing the legitimacy of IR in the eyes of faculty and staff and educating faculty and staff about how to use data to improve teaching and student supports. Ultimately, it requires a change in culture to one of shared responsibility for student success, a readiness to accept both positive and negative evidence of student success, and the will to act on the evidence.
This chapter describes the range of institutional research capacity and data use among the colleges at the start of the initiative. It then examines the colleges’ initial steps to build a cul- ture of evidence, assessing the effect these efforts have had on the use of data for improving student outcomes at the colleges thus far, while identifying obstacles to further development. The final section assesses the extent to which the colleges have continued the Achieving the Dream data analysis process beyond the initial planning year.